For a very long time, Americans opposed to gun control have used the example of Nazi Germany’s gun control laws as a warning of what might happen here. Regrettably, not everyone has been careful enough. There is a quote purportedly from Hitler about gun control that starts out “1935 will go down in history” that used to float around the Internet; it does not appear so often anymore because a number of people, including me, demonstrated its falsity.

Part of what allowed bogus quotes like this to survive was that few historians had bothered to research the real history of the Nazis and gun control. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership did a nice job of obtaining and translating the 1928 and 1931 Weimar Republic gun control laws and the 1938 Nazi gun control law some years ago. But as useful as those translations are, they simply do not compare to what Halbrook has done with his new book.

Halbrook traces the development of German gun control law from the collapse of the Kaiser’s government in 1918 through the post-war chaos, the Weimar Republic’s efforts to prevent the violence of the Nazis and the Communists in the 1920s and early 1930s, and then the ways in which the Nazis used those laws to disarm anyone who they regarded as “enemies of the state” (which of course included all Jews).

In doing so, Halbrook makes use of an astonishing set of sources. His secondary sources are impressive: scholarly histories of the period, such as The Berlin Police Force in the Weimar Republic; specialized works that you might not even expect to exist, such as Der Weg des Sports in die nationalsozialistische Diktatur (The Way of Sport in the National Socialist Dictatorship). Halbrook goes far beyond that, however, with an impressive collection of primary sources, including diaries by people who lived through the time, surviving police records, internal government memos, and court decisions.

Part of what makes a book like this possible is part of what made it so easy to convict Nazis war criminals: the German penchant for documenting everything, and the difficulty in making those documents disappear when it became apparent that the war was lost.

There are many parallels between the laws passed in the Weimar Republic and by the Nazis, and current gun control laws and proposals. For example: the nature and duration of the records that gun manufacturers and dealers were required to keep (p. 135); issuance of gun carry licenses “only to persons considered reliable and only if a need is proven” (p. 107); the use of relatively rare incidents to justify widespread disarmament of “enemies of the state” (p. 155); and the prohibition of firearms with features not generally used “for hunting or sporting purposes” (p. 134).

"This is not to say that gun control advocates in America today are planning a police state"

B*llshit. Thats exactly what they have planned...yeah, yeah, they think they're special, and will be able to pull one off without Concentration Camps and Mass Exterminations, but we all know where that road leads.

Don't be silly. Nothing ever written that suggests that an armed citizenry is safer can be called "scholarship". Neither can anything that might indicate that the is link between abortion and breast cancer, or that stay-at-home mothers are better for their children (how many stay-at-home mothers vote in faculty committees?), or that there is not a man-made climate crisis. All such works are heretical and must be burned, and anyone opposing this view is "anti-science".

ref: How could Germany’s Jews being armed for resistance have made anything worse?

Well as Mahatma "i.e., Great Soul" Gandhi explained to us all --just before he was whacked by a different flavor of religious fanatic-- were the Jews not to have gone peaceably and passively to the gas chambers, they would have risked irrevocably damaging their moral stature.

Just read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Article 58 was a dandy lock em up and ship em out to the gulags law. The gulags held 10 to 15 million people. Not sure where you'd be able to do that in North America but I'd bet some progs would like to give it a try.Remember Mr. Lenin's words "An oppressed class which did not aspire to possess arms and learn how to handle them would deserve only to be treated as slaves".

For those wondering about other disasters related to gun control, this link will start you at the opening of the 20th century, gun control as the prelude to the Armenian Genocide. Especially poignant is the anecdote about Armenian families, fearing the repercussions of having no guns to give the savage police raiders, created a black market in guns that they could then turn in.

But the real thing you want to watch is an excellent film titled "Betrayal of the Innocents". Please search that title for yourself, so that you can gain context on it as a well-known and responsible production. It is a bit over 58 minutes long. The final third, in my opinion, should have led rather than followed the rest --it is two extended interviews, of the producer, and of the director.

If you are worried about the future of, or in, this country, you should take a look at this film, and maybe send it to Aunt Sally and Cousin Fred.

Just scroll down the blurbs (and who is issuing them). First published in 1998 (many new updated editions since), you could waterboard the entire donkey party in boiling horse pee pee and it would never bray that it ever heard of this perennial best-seller. I dunno, maybe it can't read. Really, that would explain an awful lot of policies that otherwise have to go into the ''must be the work of the KGB'' hopper.

It's John Lott's "More Guns, Less Crime". Here is the opening of the Wiki:

(open quote)

More Guns, Less Crime is a book by John Lott that says violent crime rates go down when states pass "shall issue" concealed carry laws. He presents the results of his statistical analysis of crime data for every county in the United States during 29 years from 1977 to 2005. The book examines city, county and state level data from the entire United States and measures the impact of 11 different types of gun control laws on crime rates. The book expands on an earlier study published in 1997 by Lott and his co-author David Mustard in The Journal of Legal Studies.[1] Lott also examines the effects of gun control laws, including the Brady Law.

I don't see much difference in asking, "What difference would guns have made under Hitler?" and asking, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

There's always room to make a difference, even if the outcome is not materially changed.

As to whether current American gun control advocates are planning a police state, well, I don't know. I'd say the jury is still out on that. For that matter, just what did Weimar and then Hitler envision early on? Perhaps Hitler's early victories opened up new vistas before him that he never even dreamed of achieving at the beginning.... The totalitarian impulse was certainly there, even if it lacked details in the beginning. It is that impulse that we have to battle now, too.

A shame there was no outright rejection of "What difference, at this point, does it make?" They were talking about how to prevent such a tragedy in the future and, in any logical world, knowing what lead up to the attack would be critical. Madame Stompy Foot won, though. No one bothered to point out why they wanted to know, which was the difference in knowing or not knowing the motivations of the attackers. It was all political theater and she flustered them such that the words stopped mattering and everyone moved on.

Given a choice, would you rather die fighting those bastards room by room in Warsaw, or helpless and naked in a ditch, after watching them march your naked wife and children off to god-knows-what other fate.

"This is not to say that gun control advocates in America today are planning a police state"

B*llshit. Thats exactly what they have planned...yeah, yeah, they think they're special, and will be able to pull one off without Concentration Camps and Mass Exterminations, but we all know where that road leads.

and its been well established that a number of these "emptionally distraught" have been programmed, bought off, otherwise motivated, to make the plea for "gun control", and often make utter fools of themself on the TeeVee with their boilerplate "ideas" and "rhetoric". Many of those now fomenting for "commonsense gun control" are bought and paid for by the likes of Bloomburg and Soros. As ever, follow the money. Paid "agitatiors" to come and "demonstrate" at some prearranged venue...

I find the REAL people, those who REALLY lost family and close friends in those tragedies, who take a bold and public stand AGAINST more restrictions, and FOR things like allowing law abiding adults, already trained and with their Mother MayI Permits to carry concealed handguns nearly everywhere else BUT the schools where they are often already, to ALSO carry in those presently "gun free zones" (target rich and resistance free zones) to be the true patriots, libertarians, lovers of the children and the rest of their communities.

Even those that are emotionally distraught are willing to embrace the establishment a police state in their emotional distress. Because establishing a police state is a simple solution to a complex problem.

But part of the problem is that they imagine a polite, benevolent, smiling-human-face police state and so don't perceive what they're advocating as being a police state.

Gun control is sold to voters as a solution to violent crime, and families who have been victimized -- I should say some families, as this is a highly partisan issue -- are made the face of these campaigns. But when you look at the gun control movement itself, the organizations and the funding, it's all run by deeply partisan professional activists, and there's lots of money involved -- unlike other crime victims campaigns, which are far more grassroots -- and less successful.

Maybe it's because I was working in politics in Atlanta and saw the morbidly pumped-up fundraising done around the "Missing and Murdered Children" campaigns, but the money thing, the presence of the hard Left steering these campaigns, and the way gun control activism is embedded in a larger anti-incarceration agenda of emptying the prisons and not prosecuting criminals makes these folks awfully cynical.

There might well be some gun control advocates that have such dark plans, but most gun control advocates are either looking for a cost-free solution to serious social problems in black communities, or are suffering from an arrogant assumption that anyone who does not share their views is an ignorant barbarian. You can find people like the Weather Underground who were intent on elimination of those who could not be re-educated towards socialism (and some of them are in the Obama Administration), but most are just not that long-term in their thinking. And not that smart, either.

Well, Cayton, I'll just have to put yout "There might well be some...but most" argument in with those that claim to be "moderate" muslims, the Lefty Professor who shrieks "oh, no, I'm a Marxist, NOT Communist!"

In other words, the stinking pile of steaming turds that they are.

Gun Control advocates are Liars, or Dupes Suckered into Helping Sell the Lie.

The wonder is they never seem to grasp the proven facts that 'THEY' make up the herd of sheep that is usually rounded up and shipped for 'Processing' in the second or third wave of political cleansings. From Moscow to Havana to Nohm Pehn the real revolutionaries end up against the execution wall as a self defence by the leadership. After all they are prooven malcontents and revolutionaries. No sense taking a chance on them becoming disenchanted.

Don't be silly. Nothing ever written that suggests that an armed citizenry is safer can be called "scholarship". Neither can anything that might indicate that the is link between abortion and breast cancer, or that stay-at-home mothers are better for their children (how many stay-at-home mothers vote in faculty committees?), or that there is not a man-made climate crisis. All such works are heretical and must be burned, and anyone opposing this view is "anti-science".

One of the amazing things about Holocaust denial is that the Germans were (and are) one of the most legalistic and people in history, with tons of documentation. My understanding is that Hitler's seizing power was perfectly legal under the German constitution.

One of the great disgraces of history is that, whereas Lenin, Mao, Castro and most of the Marxists seized power at the point of a gun, Hitler was democratically elected.

Mind you, it wasn't a case of Hitler receiving a clear and unambiguous majority in a normal election. Weimar Germany had a parliament (Reichstag) based on proportional representation. Hitler's party was merely the largest party after the second election in 1932. (Germany had two federal elections that year.) Hitler couldn't form a government on his own and, via a complex series of (legal) machinations, was permitted to form a cabinet at the end of January 1933. This kind of deal-making was normal practice for the time; the Leftist parties could have formed a government in a previous election if their ideological differences hadn't made it unsavoury for them to work together.

The opposition parties were soon rendered unimportant. A few weeks after achieving power, the burning of the Reichstag, which was blamed on Communists, prompted Hitler to pass emergency legislation that banned the Communists. (A Dutch Communist had been apprehended at the scene.) Only the main Socialist party leader, Otto Weis, spoke against the emergency legislation but his party alone wasn't able to stop the passing of the law. The other parties caved and voted for it. The Socialist party was soon banned and the other parties dissolved themselves voluntarily rather than having Hitler do it for them. President Von Hindenburg agreed to these measures, although he didn't like Hitler. Early the next year, when the elderly Hindenburg died, the Nazis were in sole control of the country. The people in the opposition parties were either in jail, dead, in exile, or underground by that point and the press was under Nazi control. There was no resistance when Hitler combined the office of President and Chancellor and appointed himself to the job.

While there was some serious backroom dealing, that is business as usual in a democracy and was not illegal.

Of course, this doesn't consider the fact of the Reichstag Fire. Many people with an interest in this period remain suspicious and think that Hitler had one of his own people burn down the Reichstag and then framed the Dutch Communist for the act or duped the Dutch Communist into doing the deed. But, as far as I know, that remains a conspiracy theory and, however plausible, has not been proven.

So, even the Germans didn't directly elect Hitler to be a dictator but his rise was more fully democratic than that of Lenin, Mao or the other dictators. And that is to the enduring shame of the German voters of the day.

Last year, a liberal wondered on Facebook if Obama could simply suspend Congress, since it was obstructing him. Of course, there would have had to have been a fire on Capitol Hill, then it would have been suitable, eh?

Shocking that people who claim to be more educated haven't even read the Constitution.

Are you aware of anything comparable about gun control measures taken in the various Marxist dictatorships, like the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and Pol Pot's Cambodia? I suspect things there were at least as bad - in terms of gun control - as in Hitler's Germany.

In dozens of books that I have read about life in the Soviet Union, mostly under Lenin and Stalin, I can't recall a single incident where someone about to be arrested fought back. They just meekly went and filled a suitcase with whatever they were told they could bring, gave their families a fond goodbye, and then disappeared, often forever. I've always assumed that they lacked the means to defend themselves but have never seen it explicitly stated that citizens were forbidden to own weapons.

I am not aware of anything equivalent to this. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership has published something a good bit shorter on the use of gun control laws in various countries that eventually engaged in genocide: Lethal Laws. It is nowhere near as complete as Halbrook's book.

"I can't recall a single incident where someone about to be arrested fought back"

Well, aside from the lone, rouge criminal hostage taker facing off against a SWAT Team, how many times have you seen an American resort to "armed defense" when The State comes and confiscates their home, their property, their weapons (katrina? Bogus marital issues?) or even their children, despite the thousands of outrages we've seen in the last 20 years?

When The Power of The State is Total, Unyielding, and Unrelenting until you are DEAD, you tend to go along.

I'd rather defend my hilltop havel with a musket, against some hungry cold and "marched pretty far from base" conscripts in Red Coats with similar arms, than face what we're up aagainst today....

I fear not. Forcing people who don't think right out of their jobs, and forcing them to close their businesses, as with Brendan Eich and the Oregon cake baker, is quite similar to how the Gleichschaltung of the Third Reich started. And of course, that also came to power because of a gay-headed organization: the Sturmabteilung of Ernst Roehm.

Exactly....300 years ago, those hungry wet Troops of the Crown laying siege to the hamlet were all they had in the vicinity, with a real long supply chain to protect as well.... and just perhaps, could be rebuffed long enought to losing interest in THAT PARTICULAR log cabin...

Before Lexington and Concord showed that the militia could stand up to the Crown, resistance to the regime seemed suicidal. Don't discount their courage just because the current government has different means now.

I suspect it is a bit easier to do research on Germany, given the amount of documentation and the fact that succeeding governments neither justified nor hid the crimes. There are few other cases where this is true.